Drunken Boat (www.drunkenboat.com) is one of the world’s oldest on-line cultural and international journals. It was founded in 1999 by Ravi Shankar, an exquisite artist, poet, translator, mentor and showman too, my teacher in Hong Kong and my friend. He went to Sardinia in 2014 with the City University of Hong Kong delegation, to feature the work of Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda, and, of course, he fell in love with our land.

Ravi Shankar

The international journal Drunken Boat ‘provides a platform for works of arts that challenge conventions of forms and format, of voice and genre… Drunken Boat is committed to actively seeking out and promoting the work of marginalized and underrepresented artists, including especially people of color, women, queer, differently abled, and gender nonconforming artists… Drunken Boat recognizes that aesthetics are not neutral, and that difference tends to be marginalized… Drunken Boat is committed to encouraging experimentation in the arts.’

I really think that a link between Sardinia and Drunken Boat was written in the stars. Can you think of a better place than Sardinia to find marginalised and underrepresented artists? The whole of Sardinia is marginalised and underrepresented, this is true, and Grazia Deledda too, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, a woman from the far reaches of Barbagia! Well, dear Ravi, here are our references: we Sardinians are all sardignoli (according to the Italian intelligentsia), which means donkeys, that we are genetically criminals, and dark, short, hairy and diffident people. Can you imagine a better place than Sardinia to find the right nourishment for Drunken Boat? As I said, it was only a matter of time before one spark blew and Drunken Boat asked Beyond Thirty-Nine to prepare a folio dedicated to Sardinian artists. We were ready, genetically ready, I’d say, and happy, and strongly motivated. As on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, the credits come from abroad, from the scholars of the world, not from Italy.

So, the extraordinary initiative of which we are very proud is this folio, which will be published soon, the DB23 launch of Drunken Boat. As usual in Beyond Thirty-Nine’s projects, the task was assigned to a limited number of people, in this case to Paola Roych, who performed the necessary research, and the already famous Fabrizio Bestoso, who took care of the assembly of the product. We worked with Erica Mena, Editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, and Genevieve Pfeiffer, Managing Editor. Thank you so much, Erica and Genevieve!

We had a short time to prepare everything, but the constraint, or rather the barrier, was the English language. Speaking about marginalisation, in fact, it is difficult to find good documentation about Sardinian artists in English. This is a pity, since we have a huge fan of great artists in the recent past and today.

D. H. Lawrence

So, we are thinking of another project for the future, a kind of anthology of the whole spectre of Sardinian artists, a book that finally would discover the cultural and artistic world of this land ‘lost between Europe and Africa, and belonging to nowhere,’ as D. H. Lawrence put it.

Now, lets’ give the floor to Paola Roych and her presentation The Silent Island and the Drunken Boat: ‘A search of the on-line material in the English language about Sardinian writers and artists shows a series of difficulties (especially, for some authors, the unavailability of translated material), which seems to confirm, at first glance, the cliché of a marginalised island with its peculiarity of geographical insularity and historical remoteness, that is so strongly ingrained.

However, after the decision of Drunken Boat, one of the oldest and famous on-line journals of literature and arts, to publish a monographic folio about Sardinia, an effort had to be made to go beyond the victimistic idea that Sardinian people have regarding their condition.

The mission of Drunken Boat is to valorise and promote underrepresented and marginalised artists, criticising the bias of the unneutral mainstream aesthetics based on the concept of literary merit. Probably, the philosophy of Drunken Boat may not fit the Sardinian writers individually, but, allowing a stretch, we can think of Sardinian artists as a whole, the “sardità”, and these “drunken sailors” landing on our island will open the possibility of proposing new metaphors.

To build this new vision, it is important to analyse the difficulties faced during the effort to provide the editors of the journal with a repertoire of the Sardinian cultural landscape that is as complete and exhaustive as possible.

We can give some examples describing a parabola regarding the literary field.

Grazia Deledda

On one side, Grazia Deledda provides the most conspicuous part of the translated material available on line: her high narrative quality and her importance as a Nobel Prize winner justify the large number of publications still valid in the contemporary international academic field (even if, in some cases, understanding the limits of the present translations of her work may open new points of view in the studies of Deledda).

Instead, the serious lack of material regarding one of the masterpieces of the contemporary European literature, The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta, is astounding. It is still debased by the Italian academic critics to an anthropological family romance, even though, luckily, it was reviewed in 1987 by George Steiner in the New Yorker. Anyway George Steiner himself underlined the limits of Patrick Creagh translation, though defining it as meritorious.

Among the new writers, those of the Sardinian Literary Spring, we can draw an analogy by speaking about Michela Murgia, an active actress of her promotion in all the media, and Alberto Capitta, who still prefers an analogical and artisanal approach.

Poetry: a paradox. Poetry in Sardinia has a strong cultural weight, but on- line we can find just some feeble ethno-anthropological references to the “oral poetry” (what about thinking of the work of Pedru Mura translated from Sardinian to English, as beyond all the schemes of identification instead?)

Speaking of the visual arts and music, where the written word is not a restraint, some artists have succeeded in efficaciously expressing themselves in relation to Sardinian culture, above all Maria Lai who, even after her death, keeps weaving a line between spaces and time or Paolo Angeli, who, starting from the musical tradition, creates a universally understandable language.

Surfing the sea of the Internet we can find thousands of shipwrecked victims suffering from information overload and we don’t know if it is a fault to have tried to find new paths tearing away from our mother island. The Drunken Boat lies at anchor, it will meet the castaways and us.’

(1) Paola Francesca Roych was born in Sardinia; she graduates in Rome in Geography, Cultural Identities and Local Development in 2010. After her studies and some work experience abroad (Germany and China) she feels the need to come back to Arzachena, her hometown. She works in Sardinia in the field of incoming tourism. She is into Sardinian culture and traditions so she studies tourism marketing with the purpose to make a name for her island abroad. Her greatest passion and essential need is travelling around the world.

CIRIACO OFFEDDU
Engineer, CEO of several companies, more than twenty years of experience as a leader of a consulting group specialized in direct management in a broad range of business disciplines and industries, expert in internationalization processes.

Newly Graduated from the City University of Hong Kong with a Master in Creative Writing.